Weekly write 1: All the world's a zoo - examples

This exercise involves the writer in thinking of the whole world - objects, places, emotions, words - as an infinite number of animals in a zoo. Each has its names and alternative names, country of origin, its appearance and characteristics, its life-cycle, its habitat, its way of feeding and breeding, its predators and threats.

It was developed by the Cuban poet, Nicholas Guillen, who imagined that everything in the world was in a zoo and wrote plaques for various cages e.g.

Hunger

This is hunger. An animalall fangs and eyes.It cannot be distracted or deceived.It is not satisfied with one meal.It is not contentwith a lunch or a dinner.Always threatens blood.Roars like a lion, squeezes like a boa,thinks like a person.

The specimen before youwas captured in India (outskirts of Bombay)but it exists in a more or less savage statein many other places.

In 2012, a class of year 9s took a set of abstract nouns - confidence, hope, stress, panic, compassion - and wrote a fascinating series of 'cage-plaques'. Previously uninspired writers became hooked on the power of metaphor. (Idea supplied to Buckinghamshire teachers as writers by Richard Andrews 2010)

Further examples by writing teachers:

GossipDiet: It eats mainly fools, trifles and half-truths.Habitat: It lives in classrooms, offices, coffee shops and street-corners where it breeds readily.Appearance: It is small but noisy and grows quickly. It can be identified by its plumage of secrecy and denial.Life-span: Generally short-lived , but often poisonous. If bitten, treat with healthy scepticism. Large colonies of gossip are known as ugly rumours.WhetherWhether is a whistling conjunction – easily mistaken for rain or a castrated ram.Food and habitat: It thrives on doubts and choices and likes to live in small questions and uncertainties.It is usually more independent and positive than its trailing companion ‘not’ (as in the sentence: ‘I don’t know whether this makes sense - or not.’)

ShedsMost common or garden sheds like to huddle by fences, in dark bituminous corners, keeping a safe distance from houses with whom they may be unfavourably compared.Diet: Sheds eat men, power tools, bikes and spiders, often holding them in its capacious jaws before releasing them years later covered in a saliva called ‘rust’.Occasionally on allotments you can see an elderly shed, such as Wayne E Lapp, leaning on a water butt and slowly collapsing.

LoveAmor amorphousDespite experiments to cultivate it with chocolates, flowers or Christmas cards, love thrives best in the wild where it grazes on consideration and common kindness.Plumage: Its heart-shaped markings mean it is often mistaken for sentimentality.This rare species is now endangered.